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   <TITLE>Extract from &quot;Invisible Cities&quot; by Italo Calvino</TITLE>
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<P><B>From the foot of the Great Khan's throne a majolica pavement extended.
Marco Polo, mute informant, spread out on it the samples of the wares he
had brought back from his journeys to the ends of the empire: a helmet,
a seashell, a coconut, a fan. Arranging the objects in a certain order
on the black and white tiles, and occasionally shifting them with studied
moves, the ambassador tried to depict for the monarch's eyes the vicissitudes
of his travels, the conditions of the empire, the prerogatives of the distant
provincial seats.</B></P>

<P><B>Kublai was a keen chess player; following Marco's movements, he observed
that certain pieces implied or excluded the vicinity of other pieces and
were shifted along certain lines. Ignoring the objects' variety of form,
he could grasp the system of arranging one with respect to the others on
the majolica floor. He thought: &quot;If each city is like a game of chess,
the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire,
even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains.&quot;</B></P>

<P><B>Actually, it was useless for Marco's speeches to employ all this
bric-a-brac: a chessboard would have sufficed, with its specific pieces.
To each piece, in turn, they could give an appropriate meaning: a knight
could stand for a real horseman, or for a procession of coaches, an army
on the march, an equestrian monument; a queen could be a lady looking down
from her balcony, a fountain, a church with a pointed dome, a quince tree.</B></P>

<P><B>Returning from his last mission, Marco Polo found the Khan awaiting
him, seated at a chessboard. With a gesture he invited the Venetian to
sit opposite him and describe, with the help only of the chessmen, the
cities he had visited. Marco did not lose heart. The Great Khan's chessmen
were huge pieces of polished ivory: arranging on the board looming rooks
and sulky knights, assembling swarms of pawns, drawing straight or oblique
avenues like a queen's progress, Marco recreated the perspectives and the
spaces of black and white cities on moonlit nights.</B></P>

<P><B>Contemplating these essential landscapes, Kublai reflected on the
invisible order that sustains cities, on the rules that decreed how they
rise, take shape and prosper, adapting themselves to the seasons, and then
how they sadden and fall in ruins. At times he thought he was on the verge
of discovering a coherent, harmonious system underlying the infinite deformities
and discords, but no model could stand up to comparison with the game of
chess. Perhaps, instead of racking one's brain to suggest with the ivory
pieces' scant help visions which were anyway destined to oblivion, it would
suffice to play a game according to the rules, and to consider each successive
state of the board as one of the countless forms that the system of forms
assembles and destroys.</B></P>

<P><B>Now Kublai Khan no longer had to send Marco Polo on distant expeditions:
he kept him playing endless games of chess. Knowledge of the empire was
hidden in the pattern drawn by the angular shifts of the knight, by the
diagonal passages opened by the bishop's incursions, by the lumbering,
cautious tread of the king and the humble pawn, by the inexorable ups and
downs of every game.</B></P>

<P><B>The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the
game's purpose that eluded him. Each game ends in a gain or a loss: but
of what? What were the true stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the
king, knocked aside by the winner's hand, a black or a white square remains.
By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had
arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the
empire's multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes. It was reduced
to a square of planed wood: nothingness. . . .</B></P>

<P><B>. . . The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it
was the game's reason that eluded him. The end of every game is a gain
or a loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneath
the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner's hand, nothingness remains:
a black square, or a white one. By disembodying his conquests to reduce
them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the
definitive conquest, of which the empire's multiform treasures were only
illusory envelopes; it was reduced to a square of planed wood.</B></P>

<P><B>Then Marco Polo spoke: &quot;Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with
two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is
fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought:
you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made
out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night's
frost forced it to desist.&quot;</B></P>

<P><B>Until then the Great Khan had not realized that the foreigner knew
how to express himself fluently in his language, but it was not this fluency
that amazed him.</B></P>

<P><B>&quot;Here is a thicker pore: perhaps it was a larvum's nest; not
a woodworm, because, once born, it would have begun to dig, but a caterpillar
that gnawed the leaves and was the cause of the tree's being chosen for
chopping down . . . This edge was scored by the wood carver with his gouge
so that it would adhere to the next square, more protruding. . . .&quot;</B></P>

<P><B>The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth
and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo was already talking about ebony
forests, about rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers, of docks,
of women at the windows. . . .</B></P>

<P><I>&quot;Invisible Cities&quot; - Italo Calvino. </I></P>

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